Strange Male Porn

I wrote an earlier post on what seems to me a queer (as in weird!) phenomenon, the man-2-man pornographic romance novel written by women for women. My head gets a little twisted just thinking about it. This is strange male porn, indeed.

The latest novel I've read in this genre is Caught Running, Madeleine Urban and Abigail Roux, Dreamspinner Press, 2007. It is the story of two baseball coaches in a high school in Georgia, one a jock, the other a nerd. Add a lot of sensitive introspection, a huge dose of male insecurity and 107 pages of narrative before the first kiss, and you have a romance novel. The first sex scene starts on page 120.

But the sex is not something either John Preston or Bob Vickery would write, or even Victor J. Banis. The scene is very long (one page of foreplay, four pages of "sex," and three pages of afterglow). The writing isn't particularly hot, but very mutual, caring, and supportive - not at all like gay porn. Do women really read this? I read some of the reviews on Amazon, and the ladies evidently eat this up. Even some of the gay guys ate it up, although the most literary gay review made the point that the book was obviously not written by a gay man, and the book truly is a romance and written for women.

This really is strange male porn. The men have feelings as well as penises. They fall in love, rather than lust. The sex, while being rather complete in description does not for the most part consist of hard, throbbing members and tight white-hot holes. And that's just the way the ladies want it.